from Hacker News

Web designs are getting too complicated

by parkcedar on 6/9/25, 4:33 AM with 76 comments

  • by chrismorgan on 6/9/25, 5:53 AM

    Starting with Awwwards is a mistake. Awwwards is not representative of the web at large—it is an art gallery of interesting, atypical and normally impractical and/or bad designs. Boringly good sites will never appear on there, they’re not interesting.

    Awwwards is not at all representative of the web at large. The set of problems of most websites are almost entirely disjoint from the set of problems on Awwwards sites.

    I would also say, in response to one heading in this article—the numbers do lie. The studies it alludes to are somewhere between old and ancient, and being taken significantly out of context and applied far beyond their actual studied scope. The Amazon figure especially is transparently irrelevant in the context of this article.

    Yes, things are stupidly bad, but unfortunately this article is shallowly bad too.

  • by jameslk on 6/9/25, 6:03 AM

    Kind of a low effort article? Forms an opinion on web perf trends based on a design awards site, pulls some basic stats you can find on wpostats.com, and then uses irrelevant metrics such as page weight[0] instead of user centric perf metrics[1].

    Yes websites have become more complicated[2]. HTTP Archive has been tracking that for a long time. But this isn’t new. And actually web performance isn’t getting worse, it’s been getting better[3].

    0. https://www.speedshop.co/2015/11/05/page-weight-doesnt-matte...

    1. https://web.dev/articles/user-centric-performance-metrics

    2. https://httparchive.org/reports/state-of-javascript

    3. https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/55bc8fad-44c2-4280...

  • by andirk on 6/9/25, 7:34 AM

    Example: Reddit is persistent on the user downloading the app when almost everything I digest from it is 95% plain text and basic images, and occasionally a video embed. There is zero use for an app when the World Wide Web was made for this type of content since the early 1990s.

    Maybe that's more an app vs mobile web argument, but the point is adding complexity that adds no value is really annoying.

  • by neya on 6/9/25, 6:23 AM

    I think the perfect era for webpages were the late 1990s to early 2000s. No popups, good old marquee, buttons were clear and explicit, you could confidently click a hyperlink knowing full well it's going to take you to the page it said it would. Today, we've lost the original meaning and intent of the hyperlink - if you clicked one, it could open a popup, trigger some dumb react component to display something as simple as a list (Facebook does this), open a random porn site or take away your life savings.

    Just a sad state of affairs overall.

  • by rpgbr on 6/9/25, 1:00 PM

    The beauty of the web is that you can design sites as if we were in the 2000s. And they work fine!

    I can't wrap my head over things like React, Next.js, Vue, Tailwind (styling web pages directly in the HTML!?)… still code HTML and CSS by hand, and it's fine. Better than ever have been.

  • by rchaud on 6/9/25, 4:48 PM

    Websites today exist to sell things.

    Awwwards websites are pretty much exclusively web design agency sites. These are selling the services of those agencies, which lean towards art direction, graphic design and video production. Nobody is hiring them to build the marketing website for Stripe, or Shopify or Astro or whatever else lies in the boring world of cookie-cutter SaaS sites.

    There was a time when sites were created purely for artistic reasons and would get awards, which encouraged visitors to check those sites out. That era of the web has been over for at least 15 years, or roughly when Flash gave up the ghost. Since then, web design became about how fast it could get you to hit the "Sign Up / Buy / Subscribe" button. And it turns out, they're still very heavy bandwidth-wise, only instead of interesting interaction design, the heft comes from the JS frameworks and invisible analytics scripts running underneath the hood.

  • by k310 on 6/9/25, 5:22 AM

    Many web pages are impossible to read without ad-blockers, Safari Reader, or whatever Firefox does to print (to pdf). I've tried other readability extensions and they didn't satisfy.

  • by binary132 on 6/9/25, 2:02 PM

    I feel like this article is bait for web designers to get defensive about and self-identify as bloatlords.

  • by donatj on 6/9/25, 11:10 AM

    I really hate animations I have to sit through just to use the site. Even if it's just a second or two, that's a second or two per time I use the site and that adds up over time especially if I am forced to use the site like certain corporate SaaS's I could name.

  • by neepi on 6/9/25, 6:18 AM

    So I needed a nice looking static page kicked up on a CloudFront endpoint the other week. Just one single static page which had corp branding on it and had some blurb, a title and a link to a dataset we publish occasionally on it. This is so we can send it out in an email.

    I left it to our web team with that explicit requirement and they came back with a bloody react front end. Went back to them with a WTF and it turns out they actually can't do static html any more. No joke. I nearly died inside.

    As I'm crap at HTML and CSS, ChatGPT did the job in the end and I cleaned it up a bit.

    Perhaps it's the people?

  • by jfernandezr on 6/9/25, 8:55 AM

    I remember when doing web development in 2001 in a company with massive traffic we had a total size limit imposed in each landing page or site, kind of what it's still required for ad networks.

    It wasn't unusual to reject some designs due to weight. 500 Kb tops at the begging, so degraded backgrounds were a no-go.

  • by FinnLobsien on 6/9/25, 8:56 AM

    Judging the state of web design by award-winning websites is like judging the state of movies by Cannes winners. The movies that win at Cannes are not the movies most people are watching.

    I think a much bigger problem are the endless ads, pop-ups, distracting animations etc.

  • by librasteve on 6/9/25, 11:19 AM

    turns out that this was a different rant than the one i was hoping for - that web designs are too complicated because they are far, far into diminishing returns

    seems that the current generation of tooling (React) is encouraging folks to want to design a facebook, when a nice, clean, mainly static site with well designed layouts, navigation and clearly presented information is what people want to make a business decision and to get on with their day

    disclosures i am the grug brained dev of https://harcstack.org which is trying to leverage HTMX to make the pain go away

  • by graic on 6/9/25, 8:16 AM

    The irony of complaining about over designed sites only to have a hidden form be revealed from the bottom of the page.

    > The web exists to connect people and share information. Let's not confuse it with an art gallery.

    websites are art

  • by locallost on 6/9/25, 5:52 AM

    > Let's be honest: you're designing to impress other designers, not users. And that's the problem.

    I've referred to this as "CV driven development". Although to be fair that developer that designs a microservice architecture for 50 users is not better either.

    But on the whole, I don't agree with the title. My feeling is - overall - pages have become a lot less gimmicky than they used to be.

  • by nilirl on 6/9/25, 7:58 AM

    This is an unkind argument.

    There is no one true way to prioritize design in all contexts. That defeats the point of design: highly-contextualized problem solving.

    In some contexts simplicity and speed are not the highest priorities; memorability is.

  • by demarq on 6/9/25, 9:39 AM

    I laughed when I saw the footer

  • by nness on 6/9/25, 9:21 AM

    This brings me back to the days of Flash-based websites...

  • by andsoitis on 6/9/25, 4:58 AM

    ”Yet here we are - the average website now weighs around 2.5MB according to HTTP Archive. That's heavier than the original Doom game.”

  • by afavour on 6/9/25, 3:22 PM

    There's a happy medium here. Yeah, the Awwwards site the author linked to showcases excesses, but isn't that the point? Those sites are designed to be excessive.

    I'm mindful of performance on the sites I make but I also don't want the entire internet to prioritize shopping basket conversions. Some whimsy can be good.

  • by Am4TIfIsER0ppos on 6/9/25, 9:14 AM

  • by CommenterPerson on 6/9/25, 3:21 PM

    A thousand times yes. One word: " Enshittification" captures what has become of the web.

  • by throwaway81523 on 6/9/25, 5:25 AM

    In other news, water is wet.

  • by bravesoul2 on 6/9/25, 5:42 AM

    Oi designers? You mean oi enshittifing CTOs?